I gasped when her property appeared over the tree line. I’d imagined a pleasant rambler of a house, but Merysfield Park was a proper stately home—an ostentatious three-story Elizabethan crafted from honey-colored stone and crowned with a thrilling jumble of Dutch gables, Gothic pinnacles, and a preponderance of orderly rectangular windows peering solemnly at us, set on a hundred acres and newly open to the public to pay for its upkeep. Tonight, the path to the house was lit with what had to be three hundred candles set inside hurricane jars, and the trees lining the gravel driveway were hung with fairy lights.

“Impressive, eh?” Nick said as we inched ever closer to the drop-off. “They filmed that new Pride and Prejudice here.”

It smelled like pine inside the high-ceilinged foyer, where half of Annabelle’s staff was taking coats and hats in full livery. In the corner, near the two fully decorated Christmas trees—the source of the smell—two men in Elizabethan gear were playing the lute. Her golden retriever was wearing a bowler hat.

“Nicky!” Annabelle cooed, sidling up to us in a snug red velvet halter sheath, her expansive blond locks falling loose and feathered around her shoulders like a vintage Farrah Fawcett poster. Reflexively I ran a hand down my own body, over the stomach that was soft and kneadable from hormones and a long deferral of gym time. I hated that I cared, and also that I hadn’t thought to care until now. I’d spent months before my wedding being reminded that my appearance was part of my job, and therefore fodder for dissection, but I’d had a weird relationship to my body in the last few weeks—as if I’d been afraid to do anything with it, lest I provoke it into betraying me again.

“Happy New Year, Annie,” Nick said, kissing both her cheeks politely.

“And it’s so brilliant to see you, Bex,” Annabelle said, turning to me. “We missed you last year. I had to work overtime to keep a smile on this one’s face.” She nudged Nick affectionately.

“Your house is…beyond,” I said, staring up at the Gothic arches in the hall ceiling, some forty feet above my head. It was rare that Nick and I found ourselves in a house that was more awe inspiring than his grandmother’s. “It must have been hard to leave it for Dubai.”